I want you to open your Bible with me in Matthew, Chapter 22. I want you to look in Verse 36, and we're sharing about the Extravagant Love, and I shared about loving God passionately, then last week I shared just on loving yourself, which is a bit of a difficult thing for many people to do. We just want to carry that on, and just go a little further with that today. Loving yourself is not the same as being self-centred, wrapped up in yourself, it's all about me! It's not that. Loving yourself is not about being selfish, me first. It's nothing to do with any of that. Loving yourself has to do with placing the appropriate value upon your life that God has placed. It's coming into agreement with Him, and what I've observed with people is that if people don't value themselves, and don't actually love and respect and treat themselves as Jesus treats us, then what happens is relationships are affected by that, and the way we see ourself, it defiles or comes into other relationships, so people with a lot of rejection either are dysfunctional in their relating, or they use relationships to get a need met.

God wants us to grow whole on the inside. One of the ways you grow whole, you have a great self-esteem, you begin to agree with what God says about you. I was talking to one of the teachers we had in our church a while ago, and she was working out at Flaxmere. She was working with low achieving students, and she said she consistently got higher achievements out of them. She was called to Wellington to have a look. She's actually down there now working with Wellington in head office, shaping policy. I said what was the key to raising the achievement, and she said it was a very simple one. We had to raise their self-esteem, the way they saw themselves. With a low esteem it was impossible to achieve, because every time anything happened in the work, it would immediately resonate inside, well I'm a failure, I'm no good anyway. Then they would give up and not progress, so she said the key to shifting them was to get the esteem or the value, or just to change their way of looking at themselves, so they actually valued themselves. Isn't that an interesting one aye? Very interesting.

So it works out practically. If you don't agree with what God says about you and you listen to someone else's voice about you, you will have a wrong perspective of yourself and it'll be a wrong perspective of life. So I want to share with you just some things and ask the question well what do you believe about yourself? Where are you getting this information? Are you getting it from outside you, or are you getting it from an internal source? So how do you see yourself? I've noticed very quickly that when people are rooted in rejection it flushes up very easy. You pay them a compliment, they can't receive it. You give them a gift, they find it troublesome to receive. You acknowledge and honour them, they actually find a lot of emotions come up, very, very difficult to handle it because inside they believe I'm not really valuable.

So we want to just show you some keys again how to shift that, so here's some practical keys of what you can do that will actually work at addressing this area of your life. The Bible says love your neighbour as yourself. Well love yourself like God loves you. Amen - so here's the first one; number one, agree with God about your identity and value. Agree with God. Agree with God and what He says, you are valuable, you are a special person, you are important to Him. He is a Father and you are His child. In 1 John 3:1 it says, see what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, or just given us, that we should be called the children of God! Another verse says, we know and have believed the love which God has for us. So in this verse, here it's very clear, God values us, and He calls you a child of God, so when you describe yourself, who am I? Well I'm a plumber. No, no, no, I am a child of God!